with a view of placing them to live, in some way or other, upon the labour of other people

Yesterday, when I said, for so many of the credentialed class, it's more a matter of fashion than anything else, yeah, I'd include the lazy illiterate by habit remnant at Eschaton.   But I can't say they were near the top of my list in writing that sentence, they're just an example of something more important.  Since you ask.

I have to say, since going online and reading the thinking of large numbers of mostly college grads, I can't conclude they got an education along with those credentials.  I think the ones who managed to get an education probably did it by their own initiative because you could obviously get the grades to graduate without happening to become educated.   They're credentialing trade schools that don't, by and large, teach most of the people who graduate from them a useful trade.  I'm told that the largest number of them, these days, get business degrees and never produce anything of real value in their lifetimes.  All I can think of is what the British supporter of the American Revolution, William Cobbett, said about that kind of education.

The taste of the times is, unhappily, to give to children something of book-learning, with a view of placing them to live, in some way or other, upon the labour of other people. Very seldom, comparatively speaking, has this succeeded, even during the wasteful public expenditure of the last thirty years; and, in the times that are approaching, it cannot, I thank God, succeed at all. When the project has failed, what disappointment, mortification and misery, to both parent and child! The latter is spoiled as a labourer: his book-learning has only made him conceited: into some course of desperation he falls; and the end is but too often not only wretched but ignominious.   William Cobbett  1833

With a view of placing them to live, in some way or other, upon the labour of other people, sounds like the American economy, especially since people got sold on the idea of "the ideas economy" and whatever idiot slogan replaced that one.  I remember back when I was a kid, the old, high-school drop-out who used to deliver oil to us used to sit in his truck reading the newspaper while the ancient slow, inefficient pump pumped the oil into the tank.  The best read person I've ever known in my life had to leave school when she turned 16 to work in a factory.  I haven't encountered many college grads, some with graduate degrees who could hold a candle to her. 

And I think it's probably far worse now than in Cobbett's Britain due to mass media and the regime of free speechyness-free pressyness and treating ephemeral commercial crap as if it's anything but ephemeral commercial crap.  Cobbett was dealing with a culture in which education meant literacy, not "media literacy," or whatever that idiotic phrase the TV guy from Fresh Air called it.

I think the great lesson of the death of American democracy will be that a country which allows permanent and continual access to entertainment designed to be addictive eye-candy will become both stupid and (especially) amoral and it will not be able to sustain democracy.  The college credentialed crowd is no less a part of that than idiots who get addicted to video games and don't graduate from high school.  In a lot of cases that's how they intend "to live, in some way or other, upon the labour of other people."  For what to expect will come from this I'd turn, not to Cobbett, but to some of the grimmer passages of  William Blake.  The prophetic books, not the happier passages.  Or maybe Dickens.  Or Orwell.  The books, not the movies.